Belly up to the Pond: Teaching Teachers Creative Nonfiction in an Online Class

In the summer of 2002, the authors' university offered an online course, titled "Swims with Words: Reading, Writing, and Teaching Creative Nonfiction" (referred to as "CNF"). "Swims with Words" is a seven-week online writing course that immersed students in reading and writing nonfiction texts so they could explore nonfiction's value and its relation to other genres, and investigate its potential for their own writing and teaching. This was a new approach to teaching writing (online), as well as a new genre for all of the 18 participants. Before the course began, the authors designed their research project to explore how teachers develop their own understanding of a new genre, how their own writing develops, how their writing instruction changes, and how all of this happens through an online venue. In this paper, the authors focus on how teachers form their concept of this genre. They expected the participants' understanding of this genre--their mental models of CNF--to influence what they tried in their writing and in their teaching of writing.